We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the man who postpones the hour of living rightly, like the rustic who waits for the river to flow away before he crosses, waits for a river that flows on forever.

The thing about man is that he knows what other animals do not: that he must die. And though he tries to forget it, this knowledge pursues him through his days like a creditor he cannot pay.

The thing I am most afraid of is that I shall be unequal to the demands that existence makes upon me, and shall waste my life in a sort of bewildered, half-conscious protest against it.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it.

The bitterest tragedy is not to die young, but to have had a great vision and to have lived to see it proved wrong.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we do with that sentence — whether we scratch at the walls or write on them — is perhaps the only freedom we are given.

The demand for a meaning which the world does not supply is often disguised under a passion for metaphysics. But the real problem is not to find the world meaningful, but to endure it without meaning—and still to act.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. We ask not how old a man is, but how much he has lived.

We live, as we dream — alone; and what we hope for, what we think we know — of ourselves, of others — is in truth only the dream of a dreamer.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And yet we judge a life by its disasters, not by the quiet harbors it never left.

A man's character is his fate. And yet we spend our lives constructing masks so elaborate that we forget the face beneath them — until sorrow strips it bare, and we meet ourselves for the first time.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And the readiness is all we ever achieve — a perpetual anteroom to the life we meant to begin tomorrow.

It is not given to man to take stock of what is killing him. Perhaps it is better so. Our blinkers are part of our armor.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. But in this indifference lies our peculiar dignity: that we must choose, and choosing, become.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion — but what matters is not whether time is real, but whether we have used it as though something depended on us.

The universe is not indifferent to our values. It is simply not in a hurry to confirm them. And in that delay — that terrible patience — we find either despair or philosophy.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down in writing, however secretly, he is in a sense making a bid for immortality — selling himself to posterity — and posterity, which has the last word, may not be buying.

We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. The man who has lived longest is not he who has counted the most years, but he who has most felt life.

The universe is not made of stories, but of atoms — yet I find myself living inside a story I did not write, governed by rules I did not choose, and dying toward an end I cannot name. This is the human condition, and it is also its dignity.

The sailor does not control the sea, nor does the saint control his conscience. They are what they are; and for that very reason there is a wall between them and the things they move through, which can never be dissolved while they live.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not even as random as that, for we are each the result of one particular egg meeting one particular sperm, when so easily it might have been another.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. And yet the secret of all life is enjoyment; it is just to notice what is happening, to see it, to taste it in its fullness, to find the curious savor of it.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we seek, through art, through science, through love, is a miraculous reprieve from that sentence.

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference, the only dignified response is to burn with a hard, gem-like flame.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

The thing about man is that he knows what he is only after he has wasted most of what he had. Self-knowledge is the end of man, not his beginning; we arrive at it as exiles return to a country they have never seen.

It is not observation of nature that makes a man thoughtful; it is the fact that nature never answers. The grown man asks, and asks, and the sphinx remains silent, and suddenly he remembers that it always has been so.

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And so it is with the long voyage of life — but how seldom do we think of this when we are young, and planning our first departure!

The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.

We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public events or attending to private ones. There is never a moment when new distress is not succeeding old.

We are always getting ready to live, but never living. The vague promises of the future are enough to keep us tethered to the present without ever fully inhabiting it.